June 2010
As we drove through the piedmont from the mountains we were off the superhighways and on to local four lane roads. I noticed that when people passed us — we tend to drive right at the speed limit — they would very often glance over. Perhaps they were curious about what people from Ohio looked like, but I think it was the ‘Hope not Fear” Obama-Biden sticker still on the bumper.
I see people glance at it at home too but at home I also see other cars with them. I have not seen a single Obama sticker since we left northern Kentucky behind. It may be that down here where people really care about their cars — the home of NASCAR — that one removes those sticky things as soon as the election is over. It is also true that one sees very few political bumper stickers of any stripe down here. NRA stickers in the rear windows, various military allegiances, and the custom memorial sticker for a life cut short that turns the car into a rolling tomb sans corpus. A few mildly Christian stickers are also to be seen including a bust of Jesus with his crown of thorns.
Perhaps in addition to caring about their vehicles people in the paradoxically polite South don’t feel the need to broadcast their intimate identifications — personal or political — to the world riding by. And indeed one doesn’t need an HH sticker if you actually live in Hilton Head but in Toledo or Akron it shows you have the means to flee the Midwestern winters.
I keep the Obama sticker on our cars because I still believe in Obama and in the promises fulfilled and unfulfilled of his presidency. I had a hard time getting on the Hope and Change bandwagon for a couple of reasons. A longtime distrust of politics and politicians is one. In my first national election I voted against Nixon. I did find Obama refreshing as intelligence always is. But hopes for change are easily dashed.
I also have a sense of the complexity of what a modern president is up against and not just responding to either Coolidge’s “The business of America is business,” or Ike’s prescient but already too late warnings about the military-industrial-congressional complex. Add to those issues our national predilection for reductionist simplistic answers and the problems facing an intellectual president are truly daunting. Even to create a national platform for civil discourse seems to be impossible. That said I don’t like many — sometimes it feels like most — of the things he has done, or not done.
Even so I’m sensitive to the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t criticisms leveled at him and to the fact that at least some of it is based in racism. I would also have to say that I am not really disappointed in him. I didn’t intellectually expect him to sweep into office and undo the damage done by the Bushes, Reagan and even Clinton. We as individuals allowed those things to happen and even rewarded three of those presidents with re-election. Real change is not going to happen because we have put our destinies in the hands of Big Daddy who will look after us all as we go about our disparate individual pursuits often at odds with each other. The hope for real change will come as we change as individuals to reflect the kind of world we want to live in versus the world we have created for ourselves.
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